MARK Zuckerberg’s bet on the metaverse initially looked like a colossal mistake, wiping more than US$100 billion from his net worth. But now it’s paying off big-time.
Buoyed by a record-high Meta Platforms share price, Zuckerberg’s net worth has climbed almost six times in less than two years to US$201 billion, the first time he’s exceeded the US$200 billion mark, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. He’s moved to fourth place on the list of the world’s 500 richest people behind Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Bernard Arnault.
While other tech titans made big jumps in net worth this year – Nvidia chief executive officer Jensen Huang, for example, has more than doubled his wealth to US$106.2 billion – none has grown as much as Zuckerberg’s. He’s added US$73.4 billion to his fortune since Jan 1, thanks to his 13 per cent stake in Meta. The stock closed at an all-time high on Wednesday (Sep 25) and is up 60 per cent this year.
It’s a far cry from 2022, when the stock, and Zuckerberg’s net worth, took a nosedive after his company had undergone massive changes, including a name change and big investments in the metaverse. At the time, Meta struggled to find its footing with short-form video while competitor TikTok rose in popularity. Now, analysts think that the pivot from Facebook to Meta is finally coming to fruition as the company heavily leans into its Orion augmented reality glasses.
“With the confluence of Meta’s hardware improvements over the last five years and progress with artificial intelligence (AI), Orion represents Meta’s evolution from a social media company to a Metaverse company,” JMP Securities analysts wrote in a note to investors this week.
Since 2022, Meta has cut tens of thousands of employees, shrinking its global workforce by 25 per cent. The Menlo Park, California-based company has made moves to improve its stock performance, including a US$50 billion share buyback programme and Meta’s first-ever quarterly dividend.
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It has also hopped onto the AI bandwagon, spending heavily on data centres and computing power as Zuckerberg works to build a leading position in the industry-wide AI race. The company recently announced further investments into AI-generated creators, which interact one-on-one with online fans.
Zuckerberg’s public image has also changed dramatically from two years ago. Previously portrayed as a nerdy techie, the 40-year-old CEO has taken up wakesurfing and mixed martial arts. A photo of a two-metre-tall statue of his wife, Priscilla Chan, recently went viral on Instagram, with Zuckerberg claiming that he was “bringing back the Roman tradition of making sculptures of your wife”.
He’s also said he plans to stay out of politics. After earlier offering up his views on social justice, inequality and immigration issues, he has since publicly expressed regret about some of his political activity.
“The political environment, I think I didn’t have much sophistication around, and I think I just fundamentally misdiagnosed the problem,” he said during a live podcast event in San Francisco. BLOOMBERG
